[PATCH v2 07/11] test-tool synthesize: use the unsafe hash for speed

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>

Jeff King pointed out on the mailing list [1] that t5608's new >4GB test cases dominate the entire test suite runtime: 160 seconds on his laptop when the rest of the suite finishes in under 90 seconds, and 305-850 seconds across CI jobs. The bottleneck is that the synthesize helper hashes roughly 8 GB of data through SHA-1 (4 GB for the pack checksum plus 4 GB for the blob OID) for a 4 GB+1 blob.

Since the helper generates known test data, collision detection is unnecessary. Switch from repo->hash_algo to unsafe_hash_algo(), which uses hardware-accelerated SHA-1 (via OpenSSL or Apple CommonCrypto) when available.

Benchmarks on an x86_64 machine generating a 4 GB+1 pack (2 runs each, interleaved):

  SHA-1 backend      Run 1    Run 2
  SHA1DC (safe)       75s      80s
  OpenSSL (unsafe)    21s      19s

The effect scales linearly. At 64 MB with 10 randomized interleaved runs, the OpenSSL unsafe backend shows a 5.4x improvement (median 0.202s vs 1.088s) with tight variance (stdev 0.028s vs 0.095s).

The speedup is only realized when the build has a fast unsafe backend compiled in. The CI's linux-TEST-vars job already sets OPENSSL_SHA1_UNSAFE=YesPlease; macOS benefits from Apple CommonCrypto when configured. On builds without a separate unsafe backend (such as the default Windows builds), unsafe_hash_algo() returns the regular collision-detecting implementation and the change is a no-op.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/git/20260501063805.GA2038915@coredump.intra.peff.net/

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 4.6
Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
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 t/helper/test-synthesize.c | 2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)